by Patrick Ness
She caught the eye of Miss Quill, who mouthed ‘boohoo’ at her. Because of course, she would do that.
April stopped shouting. But the scraping of spoons and bowls continued.
Seraphin’s voice carried over it. ‘Do you know why she has to kill them? Do you know why you all kill them? Because they are evil.’
The screen showed clips. The last moments of fighters, struggling and screaming against the Skandis. Those snapping jaws, those sharp tentacles dripping blood.
The spoons paused. The hall fell silent. Everyone was staring at the screen. Rapt.
‘Enough of the coward.’ Seraphin’s voice spoke again. ‘Let’s see what’s been happening with our Level Six fighter. That’ll bring the mood up.’
The screen showed Skandis after Skandis, a whole squad of them, being blown into screaming embers. Someone in the game was clearly very good.
April caught the expression on Quill’s face. Pride.
‘That is someone we can be proud of.’ Seraphin’s voice echoed over jets of fire that were melting tentacles. ‘Someone who is doing all they can to save the planet. To save us all from Skandis. And if you’re not on board, well . . .’ He leaned out of the screen to address April, from the walls, the ceiling, the floor. ‘Why don’t you go away?’
April stood her ground for longer than she thought she’d manage. One breath. Two breaths. On the third, she turned and ran.
FORTY-FIVE
THIS YOUNG FOOTBALLER HAS SOMETHING SURPRISING TO SAY ABOUT RACIAL PROFILING
‘Hey,’ said Ram.
April hadn’t bothered to close the door. There hadn’t seemed any point.
She was slumped against the sharp frame of her bed, staring at the empty white wall, and swigging from a bottle of water.
She hadn’t been expecting Ram. She wasn’t sure who she’d been expecting, but not him. God, what was he here for? Was he going to give her a lecture? Tell her how she was letting their side down? Is this the talk he used to give when a player wasn’t up to it on the team? Gentle, sad, coaxing, grown-up? Oh spare me—she couldn’t bear it.
Ram leaned against the wall and slid slowly down it.
He looked so strange in the combat gear. Weirdly adult.
‘Hot, right?’ Ram laughed then stopped to sniff his armpits. ‘Also, I really stink. Like maybe my sweat is masking the smell of slime.’
April smiled back at him. It was the weakest smile she’d ever managed.
‘Been fighting?’
‘Oh yeah.’ Ram grinned. ‘It’s the biggest high ever. It’s so real.’ He wiped some sweat off his forehead.
‘What we’ve got back home . . . nothing on this. Football’s great—but really, it’s’—he dramatically lowered his voice—‘just pretend. There are no stakes in it. But this, this is real, and I can be good at it. Not like Charlie’s weird space thing. This is something we can be a part of, rather than just get dumped on.’
Ram’s eyes were so clear she couldn’t help but believe him. He was so sincere. He wasn’t even trying to undercut it, or make light of it. He was so firm about it that she suddenly saw his reading of the world. Aliens had taken everything he understood about life away from him. They’d both lost so much to these aliens.
No wonder he was enjoying fighting them so much. It was his way of evening the score. No, she realised. It was Ram’s way of winning.
‘You didn’t look at me,’ she said. She didn’t even realise she’d said it until the words were out there. She hadn’t wanted to ruin the moment. But no. She had. How very April.
‘What?’ Ram was certainly looking at her now, confused. Guilty?
‘I went to the Big White Room to give my speech. You didn’t look at me. The others did. Even Quill. But not you.’
‘Ohhh.’ Ram frowned, then smiled sheepishly. ‘Right. That. Sorry. I forgot.’
‘Sure.’ April then realised what he’d said. ‘You forgot?’
‘Well’—Ram’s face squirmed—‘I knew it was on. Sort of. Just, I was offered an extra fight session, and I figured you’d be okay without me. How did it go?’
‘How did it go?’ April repeated. ‘Look at me. I’m sat against my bed trying very hard not to cry. Have a guess.’
‘Oh. Right,’ said Ram. He slid across the floor to sit alongside her. ‘My dad has told me that in situations like this it is best not to say anything. So I won’t.’
‘Fine,’ April nodded.
They sat in silence for a bit.
‘Only . . .’ began Ram. April looked at him.
‘Only,’ he began again, ‘it was a surprise incursion and—’
‘Stop it!’ shouted April. ‘I can’t believe you.’
‘Okay,’ said Ram.
This time the silence held.
‘I am so cross with you,’ April said. ‘Ever since I’ve been here, I’ve felt so alone.’
‘We came looking for you,’ protested Ram.
April silenced him. ‘Yes, you came looking for me. And that meant the world to me, but already you’ve changed. You and Tanya are having the time of your lives battling aliens. Quill’s become the Terminator. And that’s not what this is about. I thought you’d understand. I’ve got my friends here, and I feel more alone than ever.’
Ram rested a hand on her shoulder. It landed with the caution of a man who is worried it will be pushed away. April did not push it away.
‘You were right. You really do stink,’ she said.
He grimaced. ‘Yeah, I’d best go run a shower.’ He made as if to get up but clearly wasn’t going to.
‘Don’t go,’ said April pointlessly. ‘You finally turn up, you may as well do some good.’
‘Cool,’ said Ram because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
April edged a little further along his arm.
‘You think when all this is over, they’ll let me keep the uniform?’ Ram asked.
April smirked.
‘What?’
‘I’m not sure how that’ll go down on the streets of London.’
‘Ohhhhh.’ Ram’s face fell, and he shook a fist. ‘Damn you, racial profiling. It’s quite something when a kid can’t go to school in combat gear waving a gun around.’
They smiled at each other.
‘Not even as cosplay?’ he asked.
‘Not even as cosplay,’ she confirmed.
‘I was going to say I’d better make sure I’ve got some really great photos of this, but I’m not sure how that’d look if the police ever searched my computer.’ His face fell. ‘Or my mother. Which is more likely.’ He changed the subject. ‘Anyway, the talk—I’m gathering it went badly.’
‘Stitch-up.’ April raised her bottle of water in salute. ‘Total stitch-up.’
‘Sorry,’ said Ram. ‘If it cheers you up, I found out what Charlie, the great royal alien prince, is doing.’
‘What?’
‘They’ve got him cleaning.’ Ram snorted. ‘He’s been pretending all along that he’s fighting. But I caught him coming out of a Combat Chamber with a mop and bucket.’
‘Whoa. What did you do?’
‘Kicked over his bucket,’ said Ram.
‘You’re the worst.’
They smiled at each other until April broke away, her expression haunted again.
‘What?’ Ram asked. He’d been about fifteen percent sure he was about to get a kiss—which was odd.
‘Total stitch-up,’ April repeated. ‘They had a video prepared. They’d edited it to make it look like I shot those creatures. And they sent you off fighting so that you wouldn’t be there, counting on the fact that it would upset me.’
‘And’—she stood up—‘they were right.’
She heaved the thin mattress off the bed, threw the pillow at Ram, and then tried lifting up the bed frame.
‘What you doing, She-Hulk?’
‘Tear that pillow apart,’ ordered April, giving up on the bed and turning to the wall. ‘I’m trying to find a bug. They’re not ju
st watching us in the helmet cameras—they’re watching our rooms.’ She tried putting a fingernail in between two wall panels. Nothing happened.
Ram did not tear the pillow apart. Instead he put it back on the bed along with the mattress. Then he found the sheet, uncrumpled it, and fitted it onto the bed surprisingly neatly.
‘What are you doing?’ said April. ‘I need you to help me open this wall.’
‘No, you don’t.’ He laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘You need to take a deep breath and let the crazy out.’
‘But . . .’
‘Deep breath,’ he said, holding up a finger. April took a deep breath.
‘Now,’ Ram spoke gently, in measured tones. ‘We’ve been transported to a different dimension, where time is running slowly, and we can be projected into an alien war. Given they’ve got that technology, do you think they’re going to put bugs in the lightbulbs?’
‘There aren’t any lightbulbs,’ April said.
‘Exactly.’ Ram decided to overlook that she’d breathed out. ‘They’ve built the technology into the walls. Or it’s in the air. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. They need to keep an eye on us at all times—to find out who they can trust. That really freaked me out at first.’
‘At first?’ April blinked. ‘What about now?’
‘I realised they only care if you’re a good fighter. And I’m a very good fighter. They know I’m loyal and I love the fighting so I don’t have a problem with it. I want to hang out with you? Who cares? So long as’—he squirmed again, but it was a really intense squirm—‘so long as you don’t have a problem hanging out with me.’
‘No,’ April said. ‘I don’t.’
‘Fine,’ said Ram. ‘Then I’m going to go and have a shower, then go back and slaughter some more squid. And what about you, Little Miss Dissident?’
‘I’m going to find out who’s really running this place,’ she said.
FORTY-SIX
YOU ARE BEING LIED TO ABOUT DOGS
When April entered Seraphin’s room, he was playing with his puppy. He was wearing a battered old fisherman’s jumper and ripped jeans.
‘You look really good in clothes,’ said April.
‘You’ve got a nerve,’ said Seraphin coldly. He stood up, and switched the dog off. It vanished.
‘Oh.’ April blinked in surprise.
For a moment, Seraphin said nothing. When he looked up, his face was twisted, angry. ‘I believed you. I fell for all your crap.’ He shook his head, disgusted.
‘It wasn’t crap,’ April insisted.
‘I saw the video,’ he said, getting angrier with every word. ‘Everyone’s seen it. There’s no hiding the kind of person you are now. You’re a killer, just like everyone else.’
‘It’s a fake!’ protested April.
‘Really?’ Seraphin laughed. ‘What? Did someone quote you out of context? Is that it?’
‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘That really isn’t it.’
She crossed to his desk, pushing her way through the piles of musical instruments and cereal bowls. She waved the mouse, waking it up, and looked intently at it. ‘Where is that video?’
‘Well, it’s not my screensaver,’ Seraphin muttered. He poked through some folders and summoned it up.
April let it play out, following herself across the beach. Then she hit pause.
‘This is the moment,’ she said. ‘This is the moment that I panicked, and tried to fire my gun. So yes, I tried to defend myself. But I couldn’t. Because my gun wasn’t working.’
Seraphin stared at her.
‘Someone wanted my last thought to be that I’d given in. Now.’ She nudged the video along. ‘In the next frame, here, we have three Skandis all burning.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Seraphin.
‘The point is that you don’t even see me fire one shot, let alone three.’
Seraphin frowned. ‘But if you didn’t fire, who did?’ April relaxed. He was thinking about it. He’d stopped completely denying it. ‘You might find this surprising, but the shots were fired by my teacher.’
‘Your teacher?’
‘The Level Six Combatant. Or, as we call her, Miss.’
‘Her?’ Seraphin whistled. ‘I wondered how she’d got in here. Wow. Bet she takes missing lessons really seriously.’
‘Yeah,’ said April, relaxing a little bit more. ‘She takes everything pretty seriously.’
‘Sheesh.’ Seraphin called up some footage. It showed a row of Skandis being mown down. ‘I’m kind of glad she doesn’t teach me.’
‘It is not that much fun,’ conceded April.
Seraphin stood up, tugging at his hair. He was chewing on a strand of it, and twirling some of it round and round his fingers. ‘So this video of you was a fake?’
‘Yes.’ April was firm. ‘I sort of hoped you’d not done it.’ She smiled. ‘I’m glad.’
‘God, no,’ Seraphin said. ‘I’ve enough on my hands editing my own videos. For this stuff I just take what I’m given. It’s worrying, isn’t it? The whole mantra of putting it all out there . . . It’s being dicked around with.’
He crossed to a fridge and rifled through it. ‘Smoothie?’ he asked her. He tossed her a small plastic bottle of strawberry and banana. She opened it and downed it in three mouthfuls.
‘You have no idea,’ she took a last gulp, ‘how good that tastes.’
‘Oh I do,’ he said, wiping his mouth. ‘Mine had kale in it.’ He tossed the bottle, with perfect aim, into a recycling bin. ‘Take another. They send me crates.’
‘Who sends you these?’ she asked, opening another one. God, something with flavour. Amazing.
Seraphin shrugged. ‘Could be the owners. Could be the people who make the smoothies. Product placement really sells. You want to take some back for your friends?’
April thought about it. ‘I doubt they’d take them. Probably think I’d poisoned them.’
‘Won’t they interfere with your calorie-controlled fighting diet?’
‘What?’ She laughed. ‘The stuff they feed us? It’s rank. It’s porridge and stew and sometimes a bit of both.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I was told you’re all on a specially targeted diet. I’ve got some crisps somewhere.’
‘Amazing.’ April sat down on a chair, laughing. ‘I’ve missed chewing. It makes us all weird, having to sit and down our slops while you work your way through all this proper food. Kind of angry.’ She stopped, caught up in a thought.
‘What is it?’ Seraphin asked her. His brows were doing that strange, kissable thing that they did. He was now doing a textbook baffled pose.
‘I’m wondering about the food,’ said April. ‘I think they’ve been putting something in it. I’ve been skipping it as much as possible, but the others . . . I wonder if that helps explain why they’re so into the fighting.’
‘Yeah.’ Seraphin didn’t sound convinced. For his money, everyone going out there seemed to be fairly pumped up. They didn’t really need any more stimulants. But, if it made it easier for April to make her peace with how her friends were behaving, then fair enough.
April caught the nagging doubt in his eyes, and nearly asked him about it. Then she caught herself up before she went too far. She did not want to seem paranoid and crazy.
‘The thing is,’ she said eventually, ‘we need to find out a bit more about the people who run this place. So tell me everything you know.’
FORTY-SEVEN
THE LATEST ADVANCES IN VIRTUAL REALITY WILL HORRIFY YOU
Ram was running through the Combat Chamber, loving the more advanced feel of the environment. Now that he was at Level Five, everything felt so very real—he could barely even notice the walls anymore, the surroundings had lost that milky quality and every object was hyper-real. There was even the feeling of branches whipping by him—which was something totally new. Ram realised it had been days since he’d seen a tree. There were no plants in the Void. Nothing other than the white boxes, the white overalls, the wh
ite helmets. It was like the only colour, the only life he saw was running through here. God, it felt so invigorating.
He almost couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been hunting here. His old life—the life that he really should have been wanting to get back to—seemed less real than the planet around him. He blasted down another of the Skandis, and laughed as it fell back, flailing and screaming. They really were the worst things in the universe. He didn’t feel bad about killing them—not even a small qualm, no matter what he told April. It was like feeling bad about killing rats or wasps. They didn’t add anything to the world. They were just disgusting and brutal and the thought of them reaching the Earth made him sick with fear. The Shadow Kin had been bad enough, and they’d just torn through the school. He tried to imagine the streets filling with Skandis. The image was absurd for a moment, then completely terrifying, as they’d just start killing and keep killing.
How would they arrive? he wondered. They didn’t look like they’d have spaceships. They didn’t show signs of any technology. They just attacked viciously. He couldn’t really imagine things like this sitting down to invent the wheel.
He blasted his way through another two, and then a fourth Skandis roared up, lashing out at him in outrage. Which was fine, as his force field would protect him.
Only it didn’t. The tentacle knocked him into the air and then came crashing down onto the ground with an impact that winded him. The Skandis launched itself at him, and he only avoided it by twisting to one side. His ribs ached and his lungs refused to draw breath. He crouched, his head full of fight-or-flight instinct and unable to reach any higher thoughts.
The Skandis bounded after him, sending Ram scrabbling up a bank of skittering stones. His boots refused to find a purchase and he was spinning in midair. He threw himself further up the bank, grasping at rocks, pulling himself out of reach. The Skandis sprang towards him, and Ram let go, slipping down the rocks.
And then he fell through them.
That was odd. He flailed as he sank through the stones—and then they vanished, and he was falling through air until he landed on the floor. The air was knocked out of him again. Stunned, he lay there for a moment.
